


until we fall asleep

by strangetowns



Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cuddling, Established Relationship, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 12:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9548420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetowns/pseuds/strangetowns
Summary: “You sound tired,” you say. “You should probably go to sleep.”Isak shakes his head like the stubborn idiot that he is. “No,” he says - yawns, more like, truly making an admirable case for still being awake. “No, I don’t want to.”You bring your arm around his shoulders, cradling his body closer to yours. “Why not?”“Because - “ He tilts his head back to look at you. “Because you’re still awake, and if I go to sleep, you’ll be lonely. I don’t want you to be lonely.”-Even and Isak: the late night aesthetic.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Alternatively: Even and Isak stay up past midnight. There are cuddles, and weird rambly conversations, and boys that are in love.
> 
> I... don't really know what this is lol. I just wanted to write something soft and warm and sleepy and that's what I did. No plot, just cuddles.
> 
> Thank you as always to [Lydia](http://boxesfullofthoughts.tumblr.com) and [rumpelsnorcack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rumpelsnorcack/pseuds/rumpelsnorcack) for the beta read. Title comes from "[Islands](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqzPdEll1Bo)" by Hey Ocean!

The two of you get back home - Isak’s room, you remind yourself - about an hour after midnight, clutching at each other’s elbows in helpless laughter. You barely have time to wonder at it, how you so readily think about a room that isn’t yours as “home” - because, after all, what does that really mean? Does it mean you’ve been spending too little time in your own room? Does it mean you’re too ready to claim the things that belong to others for yourself? Or does it simply mean that “home”, somehow, became the place by Isak’s side at some point when you didn’t think to look? You can’t guess which is the most true answer, but you do know which you  _ want _ it to be - before Isak pulls you down on the bed and says, a little incoherent with sleeplessness, “Come cuddle with me, baby.”

You let yourself drape over the length of Isak’s body, as heavy and dramatic and noncompliant as you can be. Considering he didn’t actually make a request you don’t want to comply with, you’re not sure how well it works.

“So needy,” you say. “So demanding.”

“Wouldn’t demand anything you wouldn’t want to do,” Isak mumbles. “Get off me, you lump of a human.”

Well. You suppose that’s true enough. Isak isn’t the kind of person who would test your boundaries just for the hell of it. He’s probably more careful with them than most you’ve met, always asking questions, always watching your face for signs of discomfort that you can’t express, of feelings you can’t say out loud. Others have sometimes let their worry become so large it suffocated you, oppressed you under the weight of all the things you could never do and all the things you could never be. But you don’t mind the worry from Isak because from him it is so gentle. The opposite of oppressive. Refreshing, honestly, to be the one who is listened to for a change.

Obligingly, you roll off of him, but before you can stray too far he takes ahold of you, wrapping his arms around you and nuzzling his face into your chest. His head tucks under your chin like a puzzle piece, no need to talk about it, no need to think about it; just where it belongs.

“You sound tired,” you say. “You should probably go to sleep.”

Isak shakes his head like the stubborn idiot that he is. “No,” he says - yawns, more like, truly making an admirable case for still being awake. “No, I don’t want to.”

You bring your arm around his shoulders, cradling his body closer to yours. “Why not?”

“Because - “ He tilts his head back to look at you. “Because you’re still awake, and if I go to sleep, you’ll be lonely. I don’t want you to be lonely.”

Something in your gut twists a little, the way it always does when Isak says or does something you didn’t expect him to. And he does that a lot, mostly because you for some reason never expect anyone to be as good to you as he is.

“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “You’d still be here.”

“Yeah, but not, like, my mind.”

You laugh, poking at his temple. “I’m not so sure that’s here right now in the first place.”

He pulls his face into an exaggerated frown. “Wow. Mean. You’re an asshole.”

“So maybe I am,” you say. “All the more reason for you to go to sleep, so you can avoid my assholery.”

“Nooo.” Isak squeezes tighter around you, wrapping a leg around your thigh and gripping the back of your shirt tightly in his fists. “I don’t want to avoid you, don’t make me.”

Honestly, how did he get like this? He didn’t even drink tonight. Talk about lump of a human.

Of course, not that you will complain. You will take your lump of a human and you will hug him back and you will love him with all of your being, thank you very much.

“Okay,” you say, soothingly. “You don’t have to.” You run your fingers through his hair, gently, slowly. The tips of your fingers hover over the base of his neck, and you rub them in circles and abstract shapes lightly over Isak’s warm skin. They’re hardly motions you have to think about, at this point. It feels almost instinctual, embedded in your bones, to try to comfort him with your touch. After all, his very presence is a comfort to you; this just feels like an inadequate offering by comparison.

Isak hums contentedly. “That feels good.”

You don’t say anything to that. You don’t really feel inclined to, what with the exhaustion blurring the edges of your thoughts and a boy you love tangled up in your arms. Any words your mess of a brain could think of to say, you feel, would only taint the moment.

Though with what, you couldn’t say. Isak clearly doesn’t have the same scruples, because after a short while he squirms a little in your hold, hands sliding along your back, and says, “You are my favorite person, you know that?”

The comment surprises a smile out of you. “Do I know that?”

He nods vigorously. “You are my favorite person, and I am glad that you are here.”

Your hand cups the side of his face. “Where else would I be?”

His expression, now, is almost uncharacteristically serious. “There are a thousand possibilities,” he says, gravely. “A million. An infinity.”

Like this, he almost looks sad, eyebrows all drawn together and mouth a straight line. Though maybe you just think so because you’ve gotten too used to the way Isak looks when he smiles. It used to be hard to look at him because it was too overwhelming, his brightness, like looking at the sun. But it’s not hard, anymore, to look at him when he is alight with joy, and warm with it, and alive. It feels almost like an expectation. An inevitability. You feel almost cold looking at him when he isn’t smiling.

And maybe you think it’s a crime that there are times - indeed, that there  _ have  _ to be times - when he isn’t happy. Maybe you think a world in which he isn’t happy is a world that is doing something very deeply wrong.

And maybe you hate yourself, a little, for the thought that he could ever be unhappy, even as indirectly as this, because of you.

“Is this your parallel universes thing?” you say, voice light.

Isak rolls his eyes as if you’ve said something incredibly stupid. “They’re not  _ my _ parallel universes,” he says. “The universes are their own.”

It is as poetic a statement as it is enigmatic. Figures that this is the kind of thing Isak would say when he’s not thinking straight.

“Okay,” you say. “So tell me. In these different universes, where would I be?”

Isak makes a small, indecipherable noise, shifting so that now his face is nested by your head, lips close to your ear.

“I don’t fucking know,” he says. “I don’t want to think about it. I just - I just know I’m glad I don’t live in them.”

You swallow, hard. His words are cold against the shell of your ear, and they settle somewhere at the base of your spine, trembling, shivering. “Really?”

“Yeah.” He takes a breath, and when it shudders out it feels hot against your skin, almost unbearably so. You don’t hear it so much as you  _ feel  _ it, in your gut, in your toes. “It’s tiring to think about. Every choice you have to make, something as small as what you’re going to eat for breakfast or - or as big as figuring out what the fuck you’re going to do with your life ten years down the line, every single one of those choices results in, in all of these different possibilities. How can you - hold all of that inside yourself?”

His words pull a feeling from the recesses of your mind you get sometimes when he talks like this, or when he doesn’t talk at all - like your mind is too big for your skull, like you’re standing in a great, dark vastness with edges you cannot see only to realize the space around you doesn’t exist and the walls are close, too close for you to breathe. Infinity is hard enough to wrap your head around, let alone when applied to things that are already infinite.

But now Isak has his lips clumsily pressed to your neck, and his fingers are digging into the spaces between your ribs, and his leg is shoved unceremoniously between yours, and it’s true, isn’t it, that you are here with him? It is truer than most things. Your thoughts are sometimes too big for one person to hold, but Isak makes it easier. Isak makes you believe, for once, in the idea of not being alone. Or, at the least, he makes you want to try.

“If it’s tiring to think about,” you say, “maybe you should sleep.”

Isak pouts. “Not this again.”

You trace his eyebrow with your fingers, running the tips of them over the creases of his eyes fondly. “Kicked puppy is such a bad look on you.”

Isak has probably never looked so indignant. It’s a little hilarious to behold when he’s also this tired, his eyes all half-closed in drowsiness and his expression trying valiantly to hold itself together in some resemblance of righteous anger but slowly, surely, succumbing to exhaustion. “How dare you,” he says, words slurring slightly. “If I’m a puppy I’m the one doing the kicking. Which I’m not, by the way. A puppy.”

“No, you’re not,” you agree. “You’re a human. A very adorable human.”

“I’m not adorable!” Isak protests, frowning adorably.

You kiss his forehead. “Go to sleep, Isak.”

He sighs, long-suffering. “Okay, fine. On one condition.”

“What’s that?” you say, curious despite yourself. You can’t help but wonder what he might want to bargain when he barely seems to have any consciousness left to even think of something in the first place.

“You go to sleep, too,” he says.

Well, that certainly gives you pause. As far as deals go, it’s a hell of an ultimatum. Sleep is not generally a thing you have control over on the best of nights. It’s one of those things that comes and goes at its leisure, and you can imagine it tossing a middle finger up at you on its way out simply because it is just that much of a bastard to you. Making a promise with it seems only a little less futile than trying to conceive of the infinity of the universes.

Still, how could you refuse it when Isak is looking at you like this, his eyebrows indicating he wants to be casual about this but his eyes wide open with sincerity, somehow managing to look serious and affectionate all at once? And certainly, you don’t think he would actually try to force you to do something that you aren’t capable of doing. He just believes in you, for some reason, believes that you  _ are _ capable of it. Whether that belief is warranted or not is a train of thought for another day, another sleepless night.

“I’ll try,” you settle on eventually. It’s about the most you could ever promise about something like this.

Isak nods, satisfied. “Good,” he says.

“Good,” you whisper back, and press your forehead to his.

At this point, he hardly needs any sign from you to understand what you want. He smiles briefly, small and soft, the way it crinkles up his eyes warming up your heart and lungs in a way that makes them feel tight and enormous all at once, and moves his face forward so that his mouth presses sweetly against yours. It’s a little clumsy, considering neither of you have the presence of mind for such things like coordination, but his hands clutch at your shirt, and your fingers thread through his hair almost without thinking, and when you close your eyes, it feels almost easy to lose yourself in the warmth of his presence.

You don’t know when you pull away, just that it happens at some point. There is silence, now, as you fold your body into his, your back to his chest and his arms slotting easily around your waist. Your hands find themselves resting over his, and you don’t know how they got there, and you don’t particularly care. There is warmth on the back of your neck for a short moment as he kisses the knobs of your spine, and he presses his face into your skin, and you lie there, reveling in the feeling of him against you. It’s nice, at least for now, to be reminded that you exist, and that he exists with you.

Some things, you decide, shouldn’t be doubted. This - Isak, and the comfort of the darkness, and the feeling of home settling somewhere snug in your heart - this moment is one of them.

So you don’t think about it. You embrace the silence, and you hope that sleep will be kind to you, if only for a night. 

There are probably worse things you could hope for, than the belief of a boy you love to be true.


End file.
